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 Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2024 8:54 pm
Quote: Backdated to Friday, September 20th, during the Light Up The Night ORP and immediately after Thalassa’s arrival solo.
Then, he felt something worse.
Thalassa grimaced just from the feeling of a Chaotic power signature. What in the—what sort of sick joke was this? Thalassa had only just managed to escape (by as yet unknown means) from his own world and the Chaos that had besieged him for a thousand years, and the gods, or the fates, or somebody thought it was ******** funny to dump him on a planet where they had their own infestation of Chaos? Though, at least this aura didn’t feel too powerful. Maybe it was yet in its infancy. Without Yuanhan here to lie to him for ten ******** years all over again, perhaps Thalassa could do something about this Chaos.
He thought of Rylafein and Imnolu as he skulked through the park’s shadows, trying to be stealthy while admittedly only having a distantly secondhand theoretical knowledge of how to do so. Back then, Thalassa had been more fond of sneaking into places by very literally and bodily throwing Imnolu at people, knocking them over, then getting their wrists bound so they couldn’t cause any problems during the rest of the heist. Still, he moved quickly, following the sharp, cold feeling of this particular Chaos.
……and then, he stopped dead, confronted by its ostensible source.
Under other circumstances, the source in question would have had plenty about him worth appreciating. It had, after all, taken the form of a very beautiful boy, one who had several of the external markings of a senshi, which was almost enough to distract from the Chaos filth of it all. But—Chaos didn’t work this way, right? Chaos didn’t infect people without murdering them, and it certainly didn’t have senshi among its ranks. That wasn’t, like, something that really happened……except evidence that it did was standing right there before Thalassa.
Only one thing to do, then: investigate.
In the interests of that, Thalassa picked up a small rock and threw it across the clearing. He aimed well, sending it whizzing past the boy all in black and thunking into the trunk of a nearby tree. “Hey,” Thalassa called out to the boy. “Hey, you! What the ******** is wrong with you?”
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Posted: Sat Sep 28, 2024 2:29 am
By all rights, Lionel should have been at that new club, Biolumina, doing his duty to the Negaverse. He should have been dancing, and flirting, and ensuring the Negaverse had all the energy it needed to do...whatever the ******** it did.
Ruin lives. Break people. That sort of thing.
So. Yeah. Lionel hadn't wanted to do that. He'd decided to skip the party and pretend he was doing his duty elsewhere, where he wouldn't be under the glare of a dozen "colleagues" judging everything he did every second of the night.
He was distracted, he knew, calculating how long he had to stay out before he could pretend he just got unlucky and go home and wallow in the ******** pointlessness of it all. Which was what he spent a lot of his time doing, these days.
A rock sailed by his head and thunked into a tree behind him, and Lionel spun, and started.
He knew there were aliens. Had seen them. This, of course, wasn't a Velencyan,
and instead was likely one of those alien Senshi reported in the database, but still. A known quantity. He could...handle this. Probably.
"You want that answer alphabetically, chronologically, or in order of severity, hm?"
A little sarcasm. A wry smile. Play it off like he was more entertained than nervous. All a good choice.
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Posted: Sat Sep 28, 2024 8:35 am
Met with a healthy amount of sarcasm, Thalassa furrowed his brows and tilted his head. The boy before him was no Rylafein—clearly, since he was taller than Heibing where Ryla had always been shorter, and logic dictated that Ryla was probably still himself (though possibly trapped on his own world? maybe?)—but he had a sort of charm and wit about him regardless. With a pensive hmmm sound, Thalassa stepped away from the trees and shrubbery, closer to the boy so he could get a better look at him. Or at least a closer one, since the physical distance wasn’t helping.
“In order of relative severity, I suppose,” Thalassa said, slowly tilting his head in the other direction. He blinked his very large eyes at the boy, then quick-stepped to the side so he could move to circle around the youth. Get a look at him from every angle. “Start with why your aura is tainted by Chaos. That isn’t how things are supposed to work. Sure, Chaos can infect artifacts and even entire planets, but when it infects living people, only one thing ever happens. Maybe that one thing looks different—Chaos can adapt its behavior to the circumstances that it finds itself in—but ultimately, when Chaos gets into someone the way it seems to have done with you? All that happens is that they die.”
As he came back to the boy’s front, Thalassa reached up and pressed the back of his hand into the boy’s forehead. “You don’t feel like a corpse. Is the infection fairly recent, perhaps?”
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Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2024 5:03 pm
Somehow, Lionel hadn't expected a....remarkably earnest answer. Perhaps this particular alien wasn't familiar with sarcasm. At the least, he wasn't familiar with the Earth sayings re: personal trauma.
But, well, he'd asked.
"Hm. The abandonment, probably. Parents disappeared when I was small enough to not remember. Nobody gave a s**t after that. Second up, though, definitely the thing where I watched Chaos warp this girl I knew into a total monster, and now I'm ******** stuck here, because ways out don't exactly turn up on your doorstep. I could go on, but those are the big ones." He spread his arms wide, half surrender and half "pick a fight, go ahead."
"As an Earth philosopher once said, I also do not want me to be doing what I'm doing, but here we are."
Her shook his head, warily watching the stranger circle him, feeling a little bit like something under show lights.
"Anyway, that's not how Chaos works here on Earth. It gets in your starseed, and it changes you, but it doesn't kill you. Probably." He shrugged. "I got in about....seven years ago, now? And I'm still alive."
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Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2024 5:35 pm
Thalassa frowned, nodding and humming pensively as he took in the answer that the boy had for him. Very little he said made sense with what Thalassa had personally experienced, but……well. It would’ve been foolish to assume that Chaos in the greater universe had spent the past thousand years dormant and staid. Ever-changing, ever-evolving, ever developing new techniques with which to ruin people from the inside out. Better for him to know all of this.
Tapping one of his fingers against his lips, Thalassa considered all of what he was being asked to take in, right now. Perhaps this chance meeting was not such a bad thing, after all. He could learn more so that his efforts against Chaos might fare better, and maybe—just maybe—he had a chance to help purge the Chaos from one more lost soul.
“Nobody deserves what Chaos does. It is a force of hunger and destruction only, taking without giving anything in return. Consuming everything that crosses its path because it has nothing of its own to offer,” Thalassa said, then pursed his lips and took a moment to think on how best to proceed from there. “……My experience here may be hyper-specific. And much of it is at least a thousand years out of date. But it took Chaos ten years to wipe out everyone else on my world, so perhaps with seven, you still have time to escape before it………warps? you.”
Thalassa paused briefly on the strange turn of phrase, wrinkling his nose and looking to the boy for any indication that he had said the thing wrong.
“Have you tried speaking to a royal senshi? I never had that kind of power myself—” Maybe, if he had, his world wouldn’t have fallen as it had. “—but perhaps one of them would know what to do? If you truly don’t want to be doing what you’re doing. There were plenty of them running around back in the day. Ganymede, Polaris, Ida, Lysithea—I don’t know what happened to any of them after my world got cut off from the rest of the universe, but if they’re still around? Or if they’ve reincarnated after all this time? Maybe one of them can help.”
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Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 2:11 am
"Yeah," Lionel said, "I've noticed that." It sounded like an understatement. It probably was. But part of him was so dead to the possibility that there might be anything else, it seemed easier to just...shrug. Accept it. Because that was all there was, in the end. Acceptance.
"I've known people who were in way longer than me. So I think maybe it just doesn't do....whatever it did on your world to us." That made sense. There were different kinds of Chaos, after all, theirs and the Dark Mirror's and who knew how many others. So maybe they all worked differently. Maybe some decayed you form the inside out in a different way.
It wasn't like he knew enough to say.
"Princesses don't exactly grow on trees," he said, "and it's a big city. So no, I haven't. But maybe one of them could help me, yeah."
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Posted: Wed Oct 09, 2024 2:30 pm
“Hrm, very possible,” Thalassa let slip, not really conceding any ground, just……soaking in what the boy had to say and filing it away for consideration later, after he figured out what he was doing on whatever planet this was. “Chaos takes many forms, but each of them is dangerous. Yours behaving differently from what I’ve encountered before would make perfect sense.”
He considered adding that the boy was, in some regards, lucky. Chaos that infested one’s soul like this had done to him, no matter how tainted and polluted it was, clearly had not murdered him outright, as that stupid ******** crown had once done to Bernard. But……hrm. He did not seem to be in the right sort of mindset to understand Heibing’s meaning right now, not without getting hung up on the potential offense caused by insinuating that he’d gotten lucky when he clearly felt so miserable about his situation.
There was no telling what sort of magic this boy had tucked away to throw at anyone who managed to truly upset him, and Heibing didn’t entirely feel like dealing with a fight right now. Later, definitely. Give him some time to eat, and figure out where he was and what had gone on during the past thousand years. But not right now.
“I would help you if I had some way to contact a Princess,” Thalassa said with a soft huff, “but I’m afraid all my potential means of communication are a thousand years out of date. And I’m not sure where I am, so……there’s really no telling if anything I know to do would even work here.”
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Posted: Fri Oct 11, 2024 8:43 pm
Chaos took many forms. Ugh, that wasn't exactly pleasant knowledge. Even if he rid himself of the Negaverse, would there be some awful new Chaos that might ensnare him regardless? The prospect felt....distressing, to say the absolute least.
But maybe that was just the general hopelessness talking. Surely there had to be some kind of way out, or the Negaverse wouldn't be half so concerned about traitors.
(Every one of them, Lionel thought, was ******** lucky.)
"I don't expect anybody to drop everything and help me," Lionel said, "especially not someone who just got here. Uh, here is Earth, by the way. Destiny City, but I doubt that means anything to you. East coast of the North American continent, roughly--again, not sure how much that means, but, you know. I don't know how you mapped things a thousand years ago or whatever."
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Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 3:32 pm
“Mmm. If it offers you comfort, any assistance I would offer if I could wouldn’t be personal—outside of my personal objection to Chaos itself.” Thalassa saw no reason to be anything but blunt about that fact. Or about most things, really. But most things did not seem especially relevant to this moment right here. “Chaos is a plague that destroys everything it touched, eventually. Nobody deserves to have that inside their soul.”
Nor was it beneficial for anyone else that said people existed. Most of them, Thalassa assumed, were not so clear-headed as this boy. Most of them would probably need to be put down for everyone else’s collective benefit. But this boy wanted to leave Chaos, and he deserved the chance to do so. Besides that, maybe some part of Thalassa was reminded of Rylafein. But he wasn’t going to admit that, nor did he think it sounded like anybody else’s business. Certainly not this boy’s.
“Unfortunate for Earth that Chaos has sought to infest it so,” Thalassa said. “I may not have known the planet well beforehand, but even if I had? It’s true. My knowledge would be approximately a thousand years out of date. But……” He huffed. Nodded. “I’ll be on my way. Need to find a Mauvian or at least some place to stay. And you—accept the help with leaving Chaos, whenever you manage to find it. I doubt anyone can remove such stains from themselves by their own power, and it serves no one for you to deny yourself what you need to be well.”
His thoughts drifted, briefly, to Rylafein. To Bernard. To their asinine experiments with that gods-forsaken crown. Turning from the boy, heading back into the park, Thalassa said, “Take care. And when your chance comes, allow no one to stop you.”
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